The photolithography technique has been employed as a formation and processing method of a device having a microstructure used in a wide range of fields of art including a semiconductor device, a circuit board and the like. In these fields of art, reduction of size, increase of integration degree and increase of speed of a semiconductor device considerably proceed associated with the highly sophisticated demands on capabilities, which bring about continuous miniaturization and increase of aspect ratio of a resist pattern used for photolithography. However, the progress of miniaturization of the resist pattern causes pattern collapse as a major problem.
It has been known that upon drying the resist pattern to remove a processing liquid used in wet processing (which is mainly a rinsing treatment for washing away a developer solution) therefrom after developing the resist pattern, the collapse of the resist pattern is caused by the stress derived by the surface tension of the processing liquid. For preventing the collapse of the resist pattern, such methods have been proposed as a method of replacing the rinsing liquid by a liquid having a low surface tension using a nonionic surfactant, a compound soluble in an alcohol solvent, or the like (see, for example, Patent Documents 1 and 2), and a method of hydrophobizing the surface of the resist pattern (see, for example, Patent Document 3).
In a microstructure formed of a metal, a metal nitride, a metal oxide, a silicon oxide, silicon or the like (except for a resist; hereinafter defined in the same way unless otherwise specified) by the photolithography technique, the strength of the material itself constituting the structure is larger than the strength of the resist pattern itself or the bonding strength between the resist pattern and the substrate, and therefore, the collapse of the structure pattern is hard to occur as compared to the resist pattern. However, associated with the progress of reduction of size, increase of integration degree and increase of speed of a semiconductor device and a micromachine, the pattern collapse of the structure is becoming a major problem due to miniaturization and increase of aspect ratio of the pattern.
Under these circumstances, in order to solve the problem of pattern collapse of the microstructure, there has been proposed the method of forming a hydrophobic protective film using a surfactant (see, for example, Patent Document 4). However, in Patent Document 4, there are no descriptions concerning details of the surfactant including kind (nonionic, anionic or cationic, etc.), product names, concentrations or the like.